12.11.17

A Film a Week - Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse

In recent years horror
has proven to be not just a trivial genre, but also a legitimately
artistic one. Guillermo del Toro won the Golden Lion
in Venice for The Shape of Water, Darren Aronofsky’s
mother! has driven a huge wedge between film critics, Lars
von Trier’s new film The House That Jack Built, set
to premiere next year, is also a horror, so it’s reasonable to
expect that the trend of artistically ambitious horror films is going
to continue. The whole thing arguably started with Robert
Eggers’ debut feature The Witch, which Lukas
Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse –
with its European premiere simultaneously at CPH, London Film
Festival and Sitges’ Night Visions One section – feels closely
related to in terms of narrative and style.

The film is set in a
remote wooded area in the Austrian Alps in the 15th
century. A young girl named Auburn (Celina Peter)
lives with her ill mother (Claudia Martini) in a log
cabin outside the village. The villagers are hostile to them, calling
them witches (the title is an archaic term for witch or female
demon), the mother is dying of plague right in front of her
daughter’s eyes, leaving her traumatised for good.

Jump forward twenty
years, Auburn (now played by Aleksandra Cwen, a
force of nature) still lives in the same cabin, with an infant
daughter of her own, herding goats and producing milk and cheese. She
is still being bullied by the nearby villagers, the priest included.
The only woman nice enough to her (the perfectly cast Tanya
Petrovsky) turns out to have some sinister intentions, which
push Auburn over the edge of sanity, causing her to do the
unimaginable.

A comparison with The
Witch might seem superficial, but the two films share a
deliberately slow pace, eerie atmosphere and undertones of female
empowerment created via the humanisation of the subjects. But while
Eggers’ film is all about the paradigm of time and place, which
also plays a certain role in Hagazussa (the villagers firmly
believe that witches exist and that Jews are the plague-bringers),
the German-Austrian film focuses on the psychological side of things,
dealing with delusions, sexual and other tensions and mental illness
when faced with solitude.

With scarce dialogue,
Aleksandra Cwen is left with the difficult task of portraying Auburn
realistically, which she manages with just her facial expressions and
a strong screen presence. Hagazussa relies on its setting,
The Alps are filmed by cinematographer Mariel Baqueiro in
a limited colour palette of natural browns and greens, highlighting
their natural beauty, but also the hardships of life up there. Some
of the striking images, like the underwater sequence, erotically
charged goat-milking scene and others will be carved into the
viewer’s memory. The droning score by the Greek music group MMD
also contributes to the general atmosphere.

It is hard to believe
that Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse is the work of a
student. It’s actually the partially crowd-funded graduate work of
Austrian-born Berlin-based up-and-coming filmmaker Lukas Feigelfeld.
Hagazussa is not just an assured feature debut, but also an
auteur film with a clear vision. It could prove to be a milestone of
arthouse folk horror.